Time again for my little snuffle in the Pagan forest, to see what treats I can find this week:

Tadhg over at Tadhg Talks has an excellent two-part post on Looking Afresh at What we Take for Granted: Clouds. These posts reflect on how noticing and learning about everyday elements of nature, that we so often pass by without really seeing, can deepen your relationship with the natural world and deepen your spiritual connection to the Sacred (“the Great Cloud-Giver” to use Tadhg’s phrase):

“Since the dawn of time, when our first ancestors were capable of craning their necks and looking at nature in awe, the sky has mesmerised humankind. The blue sky, insects buzzing and birds flying, the stars in the night sky forming a myriad of patterns in which to form their mythology and track the course of time, enthralled the ancients. And clouds. Clouds, too, caught the imagination of those giants of old.

For those wanting to journey further along that path of awareness, living life to the full, and being close or closer, or at one with nature, ‘cloud spotting’ is an awe-inspiring, encouraging, ’enveloping’, enlivening, and entertaining event.”

Anna Walther at Wildseed Within writes about Cultivating Small-p paganism. First, let me just say thank you to Anna for linking to my post I Don’t Want a Pagan Church. Secondly, I want to highlight Anna’s “small-p paganism” because I think that it is a brilliantly simple alternative to “High Church” Paganism focused on ritual performance, devotional worship and ancient reconstructions. This “small-p paganism” is about connecting simply to the world around us:

“I’m becoming aware that this brand of animistic, small-p, backyard paganism may be a very different approach to practice than what big-P, Pagan-identified people have in mind.

I want to cultivate a particular way of approaching experiences of all kinds, not only the ones that occur within magic circles.

I want to find my place in a heterarchy, in a world that is wild and radically plural, not in a hierarchy…

I want to know and practice right relationship with spirits that are not human, the ones with which I share this particular place.”

Over at the Patheos Pagan channel, Courtney Weber writes on Double, Toil and Resist that Witches Can’t Close their Eyes. Nor Should They. Witchcraft, which I would extend to include Druidry and related forms of Paganism, is not (or should not be) about escaping from the world into a fantasy realm. It’s about wakeful awareness of, and engagement with, the world as it is. And that means more than spells and rituals, it means action.

“[T]he Witchcraft that makes change, overhauls lives, curses and heals–is not about evading reality, but about embracing it long and hard, wrestling with it and changing it to make it better.

It’s about getting dirty–literally and figuratively. For some, Witchcraft is all about getting in touch with nature, nature is not only sunshine and butterflies. It’s also about predators, storms, death and decomposing. It’s hard, it’s cold, and it doesn’t care about us. We are part of nature. Nature does not exist for us. Neither does Magick, but we are part of it, too.

Witchcraft is not just about Magick spells, setting energetic intentions to impeach a president or curse a supreme court nominee. Granted, those things have their place and I support them. But Witchcraft is more than only that. It is knowing, seeing, and intuiting the greater nature of a situation and more than that, refusing to turn away.”

And finally, some music. Now, this is so not my usual thing musically, but it is catchy as heck, the video is great and it makes a damn good point. It’s great to see celebrities leveraging their influence to press for action against climate change. Watch to the end, then visit the website We Love TheEarth to see what actions you can do right now.